Canberra Residences got its TOP in June 2013. Thirteen blocks, 320 units, the usual condo amenities. Residents started finding problems almost immediately: floor tiles popping up, a kitchen cabinet collapsing off the wall above a stove, sagging cabinetry. Normal enough for a new build, and exactly the window the Defects Liability Period exists for — which is why defects liability period tracking, done properly from day one, matters far more than most councils realize.
It’s 2026. The MCST is now suing the main contractor over an alleged breach of a settlement agreement that was signed in September 2020, itself the outcome of an earlier lawsuit filed back in 2019. The contractor says the repainting was done by January 2023. The MCST’s statement of claim, filed in 2025, says paintwork is still defective and incomplete, along with rusting steel fixtures and shattered balcony glass. The contractor’s defense on some of it: fair wear and tear, poor maintenance by the MCST, maybe damage by third parties.
So somewhere between “resident’s cabinet fell off the wall in 2013” and “we’re back in court in 2025,” thirteen years happened. Two lawsuits. One settlement agreement that apparently didn’t settle anything. And a genuinely unanswerable question hanging over the whole thing: which of these items are actually still defects, and which have quietly become wear and tear because nobody closed them out when they should have?
That’s the part that should worry every council out there, not the lawsuit itself.
Contractor Delay Tactics Cut Both Ways
Contractors dragging their feet on defects isn’t news. Cashflow’s tight, defect rectification is unglamorous, and if you can stretch it out long enough, some claims age out or get muddied by time. That’s a known playbook, and it’s exactly why the article, and lawyers who write about construction disputes, keep flagging “delay tactics” as a real strategy, not paranoia.
But a decade of delay creates cover on both sides. A wall crack reported in 2013 as a defect is unambiguous. The same crack, unaddressed and reported again in 2023 alongside years of normal weathering, is now genuinely disputable. Was it always a defect that never got fixed, or did it start as minor settlement cracking and become a maintenance issue somewhere along the way? Nobody can answer that anymore, because nobody photographed it, timestamped it, or tracked its status.
That ambiguity doesn’t just help the contractor. It also tempts the other side. An MA working under MCST instruction, staring down a mountain of building issues and years of frustration, has every incentive to fold “should have been maintained” items into the defects claim, especially once things go legal and it becomes an all-or-nothing negotiation. The contractor calls it opportunistic. The MCST calls it long-overdue accountability. Both arguments have some truth to them, and the reason neither side can prove their version cleanly is the same: ten years of undocumented back-and-forth.
This is what happens whenever defects tracking is allowed to lapse. It’s not just that repairs get delayed. It’s that the entire category collapses. Defect vs. wear-and-tear stops being a factual question and becomes a legal one, decided by whoever has better documentation, or failing that, whoever can afford to outlast the other in court.
Why MCST Defect Tracking Breaks Down Without a System
Realistically, nobody sat down in 2013 and decided to let this run for a decade. It happened the way these things always happen:
- A defect gets reported informally, maybe a WhatsApp message to the MA or a call to the building manager.
- It gets “handled,” sort of, but there’s no structured record of when it was reported, what was promised, or when it was actually closed.
- Council turnover happens. Volunteers rotate out every year or two. Institutional memory about which defects are open and which are resolved walks out the door with them.
- The MA changes, which happens more often than anyone likes to admit in this industry, and the new MA inherits a filing cabinet, not a system.
- By the time anyone tries to reconstruct the defects history for a legal claim, they’re relying on emails, old minutes, and residents’ memories of what fell off which wall in which year.
None of this is any single party’s fault. It’s what happens by default when defect tracking lives in inboxes and meeting minutes instead of in a system built for it.
How Defects Liability Period Tracking Software Prevents This
This is the exact failure mode Basementgrid’s defect tracking module exists for, so it’s worth being specific rather than just saying “digitalize it.”
Every defect gets a permanent, timestamped record from day one. Reported date, photos, description, assigned vendor, and every status update logged against it. Not a WhatsApp thread that gets deleted when someone changes phones.
The DLP clock is visible, not assumed. Council and MA can see at a glance which defects were reported inside the Defects Liability Period and which weren’t, so “was this ever actually a defect claim” stops being a debate reconstructed years later from memory.
Defects don’t get closed by silence. A defect stays open until someone actively marks it resolved, with evidence attached. No more items quietly falling off the list because nobody chased them for two years.
The record survives MA and council turnover. Because the data belongs to the MCST’s workspace, not to whichever MA happens to be managing it that year, a new MA or a new council inherits the full history on day one, not a stack of paper and secondhand accounts.
Defect vs. wear-and-tear becomes a documented fact, not a courtroom argument. If a crack was reported and photographed in 2013 and never closed, there’s no ambiguity about whether it’s old damage or ongoing deterioration ten years later. The timeline speaks for itself.
None of this stops a contractor from dragging its feet, and it wouldn’t have stopped this particular dispute from ending up in court. What it does is take away the fog that makes ten-year delays survivable for whoever’s slow-walking a claim, and it takes away the temptation on the other side to pad a claim once things get adversarial. A clean, contemporaneous record is bad for stalling and bad for overreach in equal measure. That’s the point.
Fix the process, not the people. Set it up once, and let the process manage the people.